The Movie Review: 'Children of Men'

Cinema," Alfonso Cuarón told The Seattle Times
in December, "[has] become now what I call a medium for lazy readers.
... Cinema is a hostage of narrative. And I'm very good at narrative as a
hostage of cinema." He was referring to his film Children of Men,
and he captured its strengths and weakness admirably. It is a
frequently moving, occasionally harrowing tour de force of cinematic
technique; yet it is also somehow hollow. It was simultaneously one of
last year's best movies (better, I think, than any of those nominated
for Best Picture) and one of its larger disappointments.

The film, just released on DVD, is an adaptation of the 1993 P.D. James novel The Children of Men,
and Cuarón's alterations were not limited to trimming the definite
article from the title. James's novel was an explicitly Christian fable
about faith and loss, love and solitude, our duties as parents of
children and as children of parents. Cuarón hewed back these themes
aggressively and substituted contemporary political references--to
Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, to anti-immigrant sentiment in Great
Britain and the United States, to firefights on the streets of Iraq. But
while Cuarón's changes add resonance to James's story, they don't offer
meaning. Children of Men retains the shape of a parable, but lacks the message.

In James's original telling, the year is 2021 and it has been 25
years since the world's last human being was born. The cause of this
mass infertility--biological catastrophe? divine retribution?--is
unknown, but it has led to a deep global malaise. Humankind is gradually
petering out, and with it all hope and passion and moral scruple.
Decoupled from any possibility of procreation, even sex has lost its
recreational appeal. People want little more than "freedom from fear,
freedom from want, freedom from boredom." In Great Britain, they are
granted these limited blessings by the Warden of England, an omnipotent
but widely popular dictator. James's protagonist, Theo, is a history
professor (one of many professions rendered quasi-irrelevant by the fact
that there are no longer any young people), and a man whose life is
empty of purpose but full of regret--for unkindnesses to his
now-deceased parents, for a ruined marriage, for the baby daughter he
accidentally ran over with a car and killed decades earlier. (James's
description of this last is one of the most crushing passages I've ever
read, and not merely because I have a 20-month-old of my own.) But Theo
is also cousin, friend, and former adviser to the Warden of England, and
it is for this reason that he is approached by a small group of
ineffectual revolutionaries, in whose conspiracy he gradually becomes
entangled.

Cuarón rightly simplifies this story for the screen. His Theo (Clive
Owen) is not an academic but a mid-level bureaucrat, and his connection
to a government minister is less close and less lofty. When the radicals
approach him, it is in part because one of them is his ex-wife, Julian
(Julianne Moore), and all they ask from him is that he obtain papers
that will enable a young African "fugee" (refugee) named Kee (Clare-Hope
Ashitey) to travel from London to the coast. He does, but the papers
require him to travel with her, and it soon becomes apparent that she is
pregnant--the first woman so blessed in two decades. (Kee does not
appear in the novel; rather, it is Julian who becomes pregnant, and this
revelation--and the consequent journey from London--doesn't take place
until much later in the story.) The hope is that, with Theo's help, Kee
will be able to rendezvous with a ship belonging to the Human Project
(another Cuarón addition), a legendary, secretive group of scientists
who will help her deliver and care for her baby. On the way, Theo and
Kee are beset on all sides--by government police, by vengeful
revolutionaries, by rioting fugees, and by the Army units sent to put
them down.

The political landscape Cuarón paints is a brutal one, and he paints
it in a palette of dirt and drizzle. Rarely has ugliness been portrayed
with such beauty as it is by Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel
Lubezki. The future they envision is unlike the techno-camp of Brazil or even the cyber-grunge of Bladerunner;
rather, with the exception of a few sleek computer monitors scattered
about, this is a world where things have been wearing out for 20 years
and no one has much bothered to replace, let alone improve, them. London
is still London, only dirtier, and with heavy, iron cages for captured
fugees as ubiquitous as streetcorner mailboxes.

Cuarón's accelerated plot gets him quickly out of this urban blight
and into the still more savage countryside. There, he stages a few of
the most nail-biting cinematic sequences in recent years--a roadside
ambush shocking in its sudden violence, an excruciating escape in a car
that won't start (echoes of Night of the Living Dead), and a
long, quasi-single-shot trek (actually composed of a few shots stitched
seamlessly together) through several blocks of an internment-camp war
zone. It's refreshing to see filmmaking so kinetic that aspires to more
than just stylishness: In the internment-camp scene, for instance,
Cuarón has explained that the single-shot format was an effort to make
the environment itself a character in the film, an effort that succeeds
brilliantly.

In addition to the bravura direction, Children of Men has a
powerful script (by Cuarón and several co-writers) and smart, committed
performances--especially by Owen, who has quickly become one of the most
compelling leading men in film. Yet, despite all this, Children of Men
founders in its latter moments--not a lot, but enough. Its failure is
less one of plot than of something deeper, a composing idea to undergird
the plot.

The problem is that a world without children is clearly a metaphor,
but Cuarón doesn't quite seem to know for what. James is a devout
Anglican, and for her the meaning of a world without children is
entirely clear: It is a world without God. The creation of new life is,
after all, not only the most palpable miracle to which most of us will
ever be privy, but a form of afterlife as well (especially for those of
us who, unlike James, are skeptical of the literal kind). Children give
us hope and purpose that extends beyond our own spans on Earth and the
knowledge that, after we're gone, we will still be judged. For James, a
world without God is an abomination.

For Cuarón--who is not, to my knowledge, a religious believer, or at
least not one so fervent as James--a world without God looks a lot like,
well, the world, perhaps with a few more internment camps dotting the
landscape. Much of his film seems disconnected from the central fact of a
childless society, which for him serves as little more than an
explanation for public lethargy in the face of a repressive police
state. At times, there is even explicit tension between Cuarón's
purposes and James's original vision: Ross Douthat, for instance, smartly noted
that the anti-immigrant fervor Cuarón has made a central element of the
film makes very little sense in the context of a barren nation:
Wouldn't a tired and aging populace want to import immigrant labor (as
it does in James's novel) to help with society's menial tasks?

Cuarón is a ferociously gifted filmmaker (among his accomplishments,
he's the only director to have brought anything resembling magic to the
Harry Potter oeuvre), but he is not a polemicist, and The Children of Men
is a polemical work. Dispensing with James's Anglican allegory is fine;
but Cuarón fails to develop an alternative animating premise that might
have given purpose to his narrative.

It isn't until the end of the film that the awkward fit between
James's vision and Cuarón's becomes truly problematic. (Spoiler alert.)
Both novel and film climax with the birth of a child. In James's book,
it's made quite explicit that this event has changed the world forever;
the old order, moral and political, will be overthrown. When Kee gives
birth in the film, by contrast, Cuarón seems unsure what significance,
if any, to attach to this historic development. When the warring
soldiers and immigrants of the internment camp witness the baby's face,
they lower their weapons and stare in wonderment--for about 90 seconds,
following which they go back to shooting at one another. Has the world
changed any at all? Will it? The fact that Kee and Theo and the baby are
trying to flee the country, rather than mend it, further undermines any
narrative connection between the miraculous birth and the future of
Cuarón's tyrannical British state.

As a result, a film that began as the story of a society concludes as
the story, merely, of a man and a woman and a baby (their own fates
largely ambiguous), a moral shrinkage that drains of import everything
that has come before. This is the fundamental disappointment of Children of Men: It is a film pregnant with meaning that, in the end, gives birth only to questions.

The Home Movies List: Clive Notes

Croupier (1998). Owen already had a decade of
British stage and television under his belt when this Mike Hodges
neo-noir first got him attention stateside. Credit Roger Ebert, who compared Owen to a young Connery, with starting the Owen-as-007 meme that would persist for nearly a decade.

Gosford Park (2001). When your performance
stands out in a cast featuring (among many others) Helen Mirren, Emily
Watson, Michael Gambon, and Maggie Smith, it's a pretty clear sign
you've arrived. Owen was perhaps the closest thing to a lead in this
marvelous but very unAltmanlike Altman film, a social analysis posing as
a comedy of manners posing as a murder mystery.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003). Another Hodges
film about British hoods that was elevated by Owen's presence. In terms
of plot, though, it borrowed rather heavily from Hodges's 1971 movie Get Carter, a classic of the genre and one of the most lean, vicious thrillers ever made.

King Arthur (2004). A big-budget effort at
mythical revisionism that was an intermittently interesting mess, but
still a mess. Looking a bit silly as in the title role of
Roman-cavalryman-turned-British-protector, Owen gave signs that his
thoughtful, brooding charisma may be a poor fit for such epic fare.

Closer (2004). Owen appeared in the original play back
in 1997, before Hollywood came knocking, which may be one reason he was
so very, very good in a movie that was truly bad.

Sin City (2005). Like King Arthur,
another role that didn't really suit the talents of Owen, who burns a
good deal cooler than Frank Miller's homicidal antiheroes. (It didn't
help that he got the weakest of the three plotlines.)

Derailed (2005). Though it thankfully failed to
live up to the promise of its title with regard to Owen's career (and
that of costar Jennifer Aniston), it took its best shot. A true stinker,
for completists only.

The Pink Panther (2006). Owen's cameo as Agent 006 in this witless act of cinematic vandalism
is the closest he's likely ever to come to playing James Bond, a fact
that is considerably less sad now that we've seen what Daniel Craig is capable of.

Inside Man (2006). Here was a role better-suited
to Owen: the cool, methodical bank robber more than happy to let his
deeds speak for him. That his cat-and-mouse interplay took place with an
equally suave Denzel Washington was an added delight.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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